by Robert Stone
Look at the face on him, his mother used to say. Fondly. But the face on him now, the one he might have to avoid in the mirror and the one he wore on the street, was another matter. Richmond Hill was an immigrant neighborhood. Most people there now simply did not resemble him. They were not fair or tall. They were not bleeders, as white boxers had once been called in the fight game. When he wore his face on the street—a face now flayed by alcohol and high blood pressure and a volatile temperament—he could imagine he was being spotted as a boozy Irishman, a slave to drink and an aging ruffian. To what might be on Lefferts Boulevard a stare of curiosity at one of the aboriginal occupants of Queens by a recently arrived Bengali or Mauritanian or Parsee and those he suspected as despisers of his kind, he showed the watery blue eyes, the rosy face. His strategy was to take his glasses off so that he would not see clearly the expressions of passersby or his own reflection in store windows. Beyond his own front hedges, which he paid a friendly Ecuadorian to trim, he truly did feel responsible for his face. Almost, he thought, ashamed.
What caused him to have his bushes trimmed by a hired man was actually what drove him nearest to actual shame. He went on his errands step by step and only after using—or neglecting to use—his three maintaining inhalers. He had emphysema that the doctors now called severe. So outstripped on the sidewalk by people twenty years older than himself, blocking the progress of young women uttering impatient sighs behind him, he tried not to notice, or even to see straight. He felt ashamed of himself. Early on, before the diagnosis, he had stopped cold climbing the second flight of stairs at the deep-down Jackson Heights subway station. About to pass him on the way down was a beautiful young woman, one to speculate about, a babe. Dry-drowning as he was, she got his attention. “Oh sir!” she said. “Oh sir, can I help you?” He wondered if he would ever be the same after that.
Smoking had done it, as well as and especially his useless—as he saw it—presence at the twin towers. He never mentioned that, not that there was anyone to mention it to. Plenty of people he knew had been there. Some, quite a few, had died there. Then there were those who had been there a month and a half after and talked about nothing else. There were those who had not been there and said they had. What Stack knew was the dark side of it, by which he did not mean the misled lads from afar with their faith-based initiatives, or the poor victims, God help them, but a different human dimension. Nothing was so bad it didn’t have a dark side, Stack thought.
On a warmish morning in December he set out for the boulevard, a quarter mile downhill. It was cloudy, without the stimulation of winter. He did not need the paper to know it was a bad-air day. His tactical plan was to walk the downhill stretch, past the tidy houses of his enterprising neighbors, and buy a Times. He had once been a follower of events, but it was pretty much the sports section now. Besides the Times he would buy a Post, because it was Friday and he wanted the Sunday line. Stack had been firmly ordered to walk on errands rather than drive, the principle of use it or lose it.
He walked down the boulevard with his practiced obliviousness to what he had grown up calling the candy store, where Morris had sold egg creams and reportedly run a handbook. It was owned by a Pakistani now, an old man in a white cap that showed he had made the hajj to Mecca. He had turned out to be a jolly old-timer, cheerful, even jokey, though not as hilarious as Morris had been. A glum young relative of the old man’s was at the counter this day. Stack bought the papers and took the most level route home.
The house was neatly kept, although his household appliances needed replacing. The furniture was a museum of early-sixties style. Stack did not shop for furniture or appliances. He had bought maritime prints at one point, and they were on his walls, along with a painting Maud had done as a teenager. The prints and the painting cheered him somewhat. After his wife died and Maud passed her devout stage, he had removed the crucifix from the living room and carefully tucked it away beside Maud’s tarot cards, which she had wrapped in silk. He took down all the religious sacramentals and put them in a closet, except for a reproduction of a Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. That hung in the upstairs hall. He felt a little guilty about the stuff; it bothered him, religion aside. He would not put the objects in the garbage, which would be grossly disrespectful, and he did not want to outrage the sanitation guys.
In the evening he took his second walk of the day, to an old Presbyterian church that now had a Korean congregation. The church basement was the location of his AA meeting. No Koreans attended. An Italian-American man in his mid-seventies—slightly demented, maybe a little wet-brained—stood at the coffeepot near the door, welcoming everyone who passed through with a “Tanks for comin’.”
Afterward Stack would not remember a great deal about this particular meeting. The usual people were there. A couple of guys doing probation, half of them loaded. A few earnest Christians, an old starker from the furriers’ union of long ago. Black guys, white guys.
The speaker, a man who had been off the sauce for a year. He looked young. He was slick, he was a musician. This was his share: As a boy, he told the meeting, he and his family had observed Passover with a Seder. In accordance with tradition a glass of wine was set aside for Elijah.
“This was not sweet Concord stuff because my family did not go in for that kind of wine. This was Lafite Rothschild. So my party trick as a child was I would sneak out, grab a man’s coat and a hat I could find somewhere. Then I’d hobble in doing an old-man shtick—the prophet himself. And I’d grab the wine and drink. This amused all my relatives.
“So,” said the young man, “I’ve been in eternal pursuit of my childhood faith.”
Stack laughed in sympathy, but a feeling of deep sadness overcame him. He did not stay for the Serenity Prayer. He had the loved daughter who was rash and rebellious. Whenever he needed or wanted his wife, she was dead. He had always had the strength, or at least the toughness, to resist self-pity.
A momentary lapse, he thought. That was the joke he made to other policemen when some impulsive perp had tried to pull off some mindless caper.
“The momentary lapse of a ne’er-do-well,” he used to say, breaking everybody up.
“Tanks for comin’,” said the guy as Stack went out. He took the easiest route home.
Climbing the porch steps—like the steps to the upper floor—exhausted him. He sat down in the nearest armchair to recover his breath. Immediately he knew that Maud was home, and the ways he knew propelled him back along their history, in a way that raised and battered his heart. There was the perfume, the marijuana, the booze smell that had not been loosed on the house since her last departure, and under these, in his weak moment, all the effluvia of her childhood beloved and terrifying, of joy and rage. He stood up unsteadily and, having a practical side, reached in his pocket for the inhaler.
The stairs were a hassle but he lived from day to day. There in Maud’s bed was the lovely mess of her, hair over the pillow and the rain-wet clothes scattered around. The worst thing about her was the smell of tobacco, which, he decided, he would not abide. Not a word had come from her, but the Christmas holiday would soon be on them, something he paid little attention to but of course she would be home for that. She looked comfortable enough and would have been drinking whatever she’d brought, so he left her there.
10
IN THE LIVING ROOM he took up his reading, a book from the branch library—borrowed in its scant opening hours—on some of the intelligence aspects of the Second World War. Patton’s Phantom Army. Choosing the beaches for Overlord. He read his book until he heard Maud come out of her room.
“Hi, kid,” he said. “You didn’t say you were coming. I didn’t think you would.”
He asked her how things were, how school was, as he had when she was in high school.
“It’s all good,” she said. “It’s fun. It’s interesting.”
“Did you bring some poetry with you? Because I never read as much poetry as I should.”
“N
o,” she said. “Sorry.” She stood for a moment with him and started up the stairs.
“Hey,” he said, “I could take you out to dinner.”
“No. I’m like invited.”
“Another night while you’re here?”
“That’d be good.”
“I don’t go out much,” he told her. “I gotta save my energy. For serenity, you know. ’Cause you don’t give me much.”
Is he kidding? she thought. He wasn’t, but he was hoping for a smile in return.
“Hey, Dad, is there anything to drink in here?”
“No,” he said. “Sobriety in here.”
He was lying about there being nothing to drink. He was keeping a bottle of Jameson, out of defiance of the devil as it were, not drinking it. This was dangerous work, but an admired friend of his had done it. Maud happened to know where it was.
“Mind if I smoke a joint before I go?”
He didn’t answer for a while. He had put up with her marijuana before. He had smoked it in the job. Coke, too, sometimes.
“You know,” he said, “that crap is blood on your hands. Just like cocaine these days. A lot of poor people in Mexico get killed over that.”
He sighed and told her to smoke it upstairs. When she was upstairs she made her sneaky way to the attic, to where her father’s self-challenging liquor was. The bottle was in its box, untouched. He never went up there and she could replace it the next day. On the way to her own room she passed what had been her mother’s small office, pretty much unchanged since her death almost four years before. Inside was a bulletin board on which her parents had tacked up her drawings and various printed writings, articles clipped from school papers and poems she had decorated with colored inks.
Under the board sat an ancient computer that Maud had updated so her mother could go online. The print on the screen could be enlarged. Dad had propped her mother’s picture on the machine and Maud, clutching her stolen bottle, tried not to look at it. Still, she had paused too long not to hear the house of her childhood. His wise-guy voice; Mom, her story voice and laughter. The TV, her own footsteps on the stairs, her parents and her own kiddie ghost.
To get over all that she had to weepily light up her weed and break her nails on the whiskey cap and drink it raw. Poor guy, the hero he was finally trying to be. Because whoever the hero cops were, her dad had not been one of them. She felt terrible about the bottle. The weed was excellent. Dumbing-down weed. No one in this place but me, and I’m not here. She put the dope away and hid the bottle.
“You look nice,” he said when she was going out.
“Really?”
He looked depressed. She laughed at him. She could not stand his company for another half minute. If she could laugh at him, she thought, she could laugh at fucking Brookman.
“Have fun,” her father said.
11
“HOW DID YOU WASH dishes up there?” Brookman asked his daughter. “In the river? With your hair?”
He was helping Sophia wash dishes while Ellie worked in her office, catching up on the mail. Sophia sang Mennonite hymns as she worked.
“The river was frozen, Daddy. I mean, that’s so silly.” She seemed at least as disapproving of the silliness as amused by it. It took her a second to laugh. “With my hair?”
She’s a pocket-size Bezeidenhout, Brookman thought. He thought of saying it to her, but he did not want to render her too perplexed in the process of cultural reentry. The twice-a-year trips between White Lake and Amesbury entailed a passage between the recitation-readings of biblical verses in High-German Gothic script and the latest e-mail abbreviations, and required a measured transition. On occasion Brookman had tried to find out how she was handling it and asked her. He was told the experience was variously cool, very fun and weird, but not really.
“More weird up there or down here?” Brookman asked her that night when they had finished the dishes. He had been to the place twice, long ago. He considered himself well traveled but it was very difficult to feel at home in White Lake. “The last time I was there it felt like there were people assigned to be nice to me. Like two people. Everybody else pretended I wasn’t there. It was before you were born, Sofe.”
“That’s how the people are,” Sophia said. “They’ve known me since I was little, though.” She thought about it for a minute. “If they don’t know you, they don’t know what to say. So they don’t say anything. And you don’t. And pretty soon it’s like you aren’t there. And then they act like you aren’t there. And then you sort of aren’t there.”
“I’ve felt like that in a few places, Sofe. Not only in White Lake.”
“Like they don’t always recognize me in my American clothes. I say like Hi in Muttersprache, and they go, Sophia! The kids. They call other people ‘the English.’ They call Americans ‘the English.’ They call other Canadians ‘the English.’ They call all outsiders ‘the English,’ even if they’re French.”
Ellie was coming down the stairs.
“It’s an unusual community, you know,” she said. “There are very sophisticated people in the Old Synod, you’d be surprised. Very wheeler-dealer some of them.”
“Yes indeed,” Brookman said.
“Daddy’s asking which is weirder coming to. White Lake or here.”
“Oh, ya? So which?” Ellie asked. “As a personal experience?” Before Sophia could answer, Ellie interrupted her. “Of course Sofe is a star exotic in both places, remember,” she said to Brookman. “So her experience is conditioned by that.”
“They’re both weird,” Sophia said. “I wouldn’t want to be there all the time. I’d miss too much. Except sometimes I think I would. Be there.”
“When you want to be a little girl again you do,” Brookman said.
Sophia left the room quickly.
“I made her cry,” Brookman said.
“It’s a tough transition.” Ellie leaned on the sink and smiled at the clean dishes. “Shit, Stevie, you made me cry too.”
“I’m so happy,” he told her. He was very glad about her being pregnant, but he did not really feel happy at that moment. He was glad to veer away slightly from what he knew most made her cry.
“It’s emotionally tiring,” Ellie said. “The trip itself, the wind, the overheated airports and customs. Do you know U.S. customs took an orange from Sofe once? I said to them, ‘Where the heck do you think the orange is from, Baffin Bay?’”
“They wouldn’t know where that was,” Brookman said.
“Ya got that right, eh.”
“The Canadian customs guys, when they’re bad, they’re worse. The Americans act like zombies. Your guys think they’re cute. Comedians. They’re hostile and sarcastic. They do Scotch standup comedy. Boreal wit.”
They stood in silence for a while by the sink. Brookman watched his wife, and though she had spoken of tears she was dry-eyed. He prepared himself for the inevitable. But it did not yet come.
“Once,” Ellie told him, “Sofe and I were in the meetinghouse up there just after worship, and we’re having the chat you two were just having—you know—the difference, up there, down here, blah blah. Which is weirder? Here or the Community.”
“We’ve given her a life lived in deviation,” Brookman said.
“At least,” Ellie said, “we’ve given her that!”
Brookman strongly agreed.
“Maybe because it’s after worship, Sofe asked me, Does Daddy ever pray?”
“What did you tell her?”
“She was small, maybe five or six. I said, Oh ya, ya, he prays the way ‘the English’ do sometimes. Untrue of course.”
“I don’t know if it’s untrue.” He folded his arms and walked away from the sink to the kitchen window. “I find the kind of prayer you—I mean your once people—do . . . uncongenial.”
“I’m sure, Stevie.”
“Look,” he said, turning to his wife a bit drunkenly. “What’s the use of it? You can’t ask God for anything. You can’t request special t
reatment. You can’t pray for an intention.”
“No deals,” she said. “Big God, little you. Sofe can tell you herself. Do you think she thinks of herself the way an American child would?” They both looked around to see if she was listening and lowered their voices. “She’ll tell you how we pray. How we used to pray.”
“She . . . ,” Brookman began, but Ellie interrupted him.
“You worship Almighty God. You thank Him for his glory and you worship his will. He sent his Son. What must be, must be. You find his will and glorify it. You trust and live rightly and love. No deals.”
“You shame me,” Brookman said.
“Good,” she said. “I love you. I’m sent to explain to you that you’re other than the hot shit that you and others think you are. With the self-pity and indulgence the yokels in White Lake would call pride.”
“Pride,” he repeated dully.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Ellie said. “In my childish superstition I too still believe that God wills what I must do.” He watched her put a hand to her mouth, stunned almost at her own words. Thrilled and frightened at what he thought she might say. She let him lead her out to the cold rainy porch that opened to a dying acacia and the wooden top of a defunct well. They had tried for such a long time to have a second child. They laughed about her country potions. His wearing boxer shorts for a year, on the advice of some friend of Ellie’s. But they had never said a word about praying.